Why Most Content Marketers Are Using AI Backwards: And How to Fix It

[00:00] David Bain: Most content marketers are using AI backwards. Does that include you? On this episode of the Pump and Funnel Marketing Show, we’re exploring the massive detrimental impact that using AI backwards has on your content marketing success, and sharing what you can do differently to make things better moving forward. The Pump and Funnel Marketing Show with David Bain.

Hey, it’s David. Way back in 2007, I delivered my first ever digital marketing training session. And ever since then, I’ve been on a journey to help professional marketers pull together every disparate marketing activity into one unified model: the Pump and Funnel marketing model.

[00:37] Here’s a test. Open 10 blog posts in your industry. Read the first paragraph of each. Notice anything? They blur into one. Same structure, same tone, same safe, comprehensive, slightly soulless advice. You could swap the logos and nobody would notice. That’s not a coincidence. It’s a symptom. And the cause is the way most marketers, most content marketers are using AI. Most of them are using it backwards.

[01:08] Stay with me because by the end of this you’ll know exactly how to use AI the right way round and produce content that actually sounds like you and that AI search actually wants to surface.

[01:23] Today is a solo episode all about how to use artificial intelligence in the world of content marketing and a mistake I see almost every content marketer making with it, every marketer making with it. This isn’t an anti-AI episode, far from it. I use it often. I’m sure you use it often. But there’s a right way and a wrong way to bring it into your content. And the order that you use it matters more than anything.

[01:53] So let’s start with the wrong way, the way most marketers are doing it right now. So why does content from different websites often sound all the same? Let’s follow the typical content production process.

[02:01] Step 1: You pick a topic. Step 2: You ask AI to research it. And what does AI actually do? It looks at what already exists out there in the world. What’s already ranking. What everyone else has already said. Step 3, you ask it to write something a bit better than that. Fill in a few gaps. And step 4, you publish more of the same.

[02:39] It feels productive. It’s fast. It looks comprehensive. But look at what just happened. If the input is everything that already exists out there, then that’s also your ceiling. You’re optimising to be a little bit better than the average, not different from it. And better than average is still average.

[03:02] No matter how good the synthesis is, it’s a remix of other people’s thinking. There’s no original observation in it, no lived experience, no contrarian take, no taste. And it gets worse. AI is now increasingly trained on content that AI wrote. So when you ask it to summarise what’s out there, you’re often getting a summary of summaries of summaries. A copy of a copy of a copy. Each effort is a little blander than the last. No new signal ever enters the loop, and your brand voice quietly dissolves into the average.

[03:52] So here’s what you lose when AI does the decision-making. Taste. Knowing what to leave out. Lived experience. The ‘I’ve actually done this’ signal. A genuine point of view. Proprietary insight a competitor can’t replace. Your brand voice. And the friction of a real arguable opinion.

[04:15] Strip those out and what’s left is fine, just fine. And fine doesn’t get remembered, shared, or cited. And here’s the key. AI search engines actually want the opposite of this. Google’s quality systems and the new answer engines increasingly reward firsthand experience. They cite original sources. They’re hunting for the ‘have you actually done this?’ signal. Which means a summary of summaries is the least likely thing to get surfaced. You’re working hard to produce the one type of content the new search world is designed to ignore.

[05:11] So here’s the fix. And it’s beautifully simple. Flip the order. Don’t start with AI. Start with a human. Make sure the original thinking happens before AI ever touches the work.

[05:21] Here’s what that looks like step by step. Step 1, real customer problems. Step 2, interview a real expert. Step 3: Record the conversation. And only then, Step 4: Use AI to repurpose it.

[05:45] Let’s walk through each step. First, start with real problems, not a keyword tool. Your own evidence, your support tickets, your sales call recordings. The questions in your community, your customer reviews. That is your real content backlog. The actual frustrations real people have in their own words. A keyword volume can’t give you that. A real complaint can.

[06:22] Second, take that problem to a real expert, a genuine thought leader. Now, this could be someone in-house or external. And then interview them properly. Treat it like journalism, not a content brief. Pick an angle that’s genuinely unresolved or even a little contrarian, and then push. Ask the follow-up, get the specifics, the anecdote, the bits where they disagree with the conventional wisdom. Don’t paraphrase your expert into 3 bullet points. Interview them. That’s where the originality lives, in the nuance you can only get from a real conversation.

[07:13] Third, record it, preferably on video too. This is your source of truth, the one expensive, human, irreplaceable step in the whole process. Everything downstream depends on the quality of this. And here’s the magic of it. The moment you’ve recorded that conversation, you own a piece of content that exists nowhere else on the internet. It hasn’t been scraped, it hasn’t been averaged, it’s genuinely new.

[07:41] And now finally, you bring in AI then, but notice its job has completely changed. It’s not generating ideas, it’s repurposing original material, repurposing not reinterpreting. That one recorded conversation becomes a blog post, a podcast episode, social video clips, a newsletter, and AI handles the SEO and answer engine formatting on top. All of it carrying the original claims, the original language, the original voice. AI is doing what it’s brilliant at: scale and adaptation without ever touching the thinking.

[08:20] If you take one thing from this episode, take this: move AI from the front of your process to the back. Many marketers use AI as the idea generator, and that’s the mistake. That way, AI decides what to say. The fix is to use AI as the production engine. It scales what a human has already said. The originality happens before AI touches it. AI’s job is to make that originality travel.

[08:53] Now, assuming you’ve listened to the first episode of the Pump and Funnel Marketing Show, this should all sound familiar, because what I’ve just shared is the Pump and Funnel marketing model in action. Those landmark expert conversations put together as a seminal piece, that’s your Hero content. Original, authoritative, the thing people share. Record these conversations regularly and you’ve got your Hub content, the episodic series that keeps you and your brand top of mind. Then take key sections of the episode transcript to turn them into blog posts that answer specific customer queries. That’s your Help content. And the AI repurposing is exactly how one recording becomes months of content across the whole model. One human conversation. A whole funnel’s worth of output. That’s your content marketing engine.

[09:44] So let me give you one rule to take back to your team and make this rule a checkpoint, not just a philosophy. AI doesn’t touch a topic until a human point of view exists. Put that one sentence into your content process and everything changes.

[10:10] Now I’ll be honest with you, doing everything I’ve described by hand is a lot of work. The interview, the transcript, the podcast production, the show notes, the blog post, the social video clips, the social media text, the newsletter, the scheduling. It all adds up and makes it a very difficult process to commit to on an ongoing basis.

[10:31] So I’ve built something to do it for you, and it’s called Cascadr. Here’s the idea. You create one thing. The original video, your authoritative human source content, the expert conversation we’ve been talking about this whole episode. And Cascadr takes it from there automatically. That single video cascades into a well-produced YouTube post, a podcast episode, show notes, a blog post, a social video, social post copy, and a newsletter, all on brand, all published for you, hands-free. It’s everything I’ve described today built into a platform. The human originality stays at the front where it belongs. The AI does the heavy lifting at the back where it belongs.

[11:15] If that’s the way you want to be producing content, and honestly, I would say it’s the way that smart marketers are heading, go to cascadr.ai. C-A-S-C-A-D-E-R dot AI, cascadr.ai, and join the waitlist.

[11:36] And before you go, make sure you’re subscribed to the Pump and Funnel Marketing Show wherever you’re watching or listening, because in upcoming episodes, I’m sitting down with leading marketing experts to go deep into many areas of marketing, one part of the model at a time.

[11:51] Remember, start with a human, then let the machine do what it does best. I’m David Bain. Until we meet again, stay hungry, stay foolish, and stay subscribed.